What Makes Effective Stress Management?

Becoming Unstressable starts with understanding your stress management instincts

Effective stress management is the first piece of the missing puzzle in becoming Unstressable. Image generated with DALL-E.

It's five o'clock on Thursday afternoon and you just received a notification from your boss that he needs you to finish gathering data for an overdue report. Your daughter needs to be picked up from soccer practice at 5:30 and you need to be home by 6 to cook dinner for the family.

You've been working far more hours than normal lately and it's taken its toll on you mentally and physically.

Meanwhile, you've been trying to spend more time with your family and older parents, as the increasing demands at work have taken a toll on those relationships.

You just want some quiet time away from everything. And a chance to catch your breath.

Life so often feels overwhelming. There's too much to get done and too little time to do it all in. We have commitments to stick to and chores and to-do lists that keep piling up.

This is the reality that we face today. It's simply how it is for far too many of us. But is this what we were meant to handle?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could handle all your responsibilities without getting overwhelmed? How much better would you feel if you didn’t get burnt out from everything being so stressful?

In this course, we’re going to reframe how you see stress and take control of your own stressors by building an action plan for recovery and resilience. With this action plan in place, you will be unstressable.

Life will always throw stress your way but you will be revitalized and ready to handle stressors after putting in the work with this course.

Before we get into how to manage stress better, it helps to do a biology class recap on what stress is without complicating things too much. Some of these concepts are important though to understand stress and the physiological and psychological responses to it.

Stress is an evolutionary response to threats in our environment. I prefer to also think of stress as a response to a challenge, whether perceived or real. As we’ll see in upcoming sections of Unstressable, how you perceive stress makes a big difference in handling it well and adapting in a healthy way.

For our caveman ancestors, a twig snapping while out on a hunt would put them on high alert because it might mean a predator is lurking in the nearby bushes. Adrenaline floods the system and the body goes into fight or flight mode. With heightened alertness, narrowed vision, and accelerated heart rate and breathing, our body is triggered to react to the potential threat.

Let’s Start With A Quick Look at the Sympathetic versus Parasympathetic Responses

This is what the sympathetic nervous system does when engaged. It’s our threat response system. Perceived threat is the key word here because there may or may not have been something dangerous hiding in the bushes but our brains and bodies are wired nonetheless to react and survive just in case.

Our brains very rapidly will respond with this same sympathetic response just by thinking about dangerous or stressful situations. Think about the experience of watching a scary movie. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you clench the edges of your seat and have probably been startled into flinching or screaming out a time or two.

If we let our primitive brain run the show, it doesn’t know the difference between a panther in the jungle and the competing demands of work and home life compounding until you are burnt out.

So it’s all fine and healthy to be able to respond to threats that are real or prepare for challenges that might come up, but as that initial scene of the stressed-out parent working late portrays, the real issue we face with stress is when it becomes chronic and pervasive in our lives.

Even our hunter-gatherer friend went back to the relative safety of the cave, had a meal with family around the fire, and went to sleep to relax and rest. The parasympathetic nervous system was engaged. People often know this as the rest and digest system and it counteracts the sympathetic nervous system to help us relax and recover. But we have to be able to reduce stress to really engage the parasympathetic response, and that includes those perceived threats like feeling rushed around after work is over, having our phones firing off never-ending notifications, and knowing that our to-do list at work is growing ever longer.

So along with the right perception of what stress is signalling in us, we have to have the right systems, schedules, and structures in our lives to win the war against stress.

That’s why Unstressable is structured into three stages the way it is.

Stage 1 is about taking control of stress and developing the mindset to help you to become unstressable.

Stage 2 goes into the deep health model and helps you to identify your own deep stressors and which areas of your life are most immediately stressful so that you know what needs addressing first.

Stage 3 is where you develop your own recovery and resilience plan including finding your stress sweet spot and adapting to grow to handle new challenges.

Before we go any further, the first action in your workbook is to link the deeper purpose for why you are here to the work you are about to put in. Because this won’t be a passive learning experience. As a coach and someone who loves learning new information, I have undoubtedly found that putting in the work to make learning active enhances retention and helps you to stick to it so that it positively impacts your life. So even if it takes you longer to complete the work of Unstressable and apply it to your situation, make the time to follow through with the questions.

What is the most effective strategy for stress relief?